Updated
Apple's iPad won't be available in the company's brick-and-mortar stores until this Saturday, but on Monday Cupertino added a series of videos to its website that provide more detail on the device's "magical and revolutionary" capabilities - and The Reg sat through each self-congratulatory video to give you a deep-dive preview.

Review
Sony Ericsson's latest style phone certainly cuts a dash with its unique curvy shape. But its focus is on HD video capture, rather than just movie viewing, with its 8.1Mp stills camera also capable of recording moving images in 720p HD. With Wi-Fi, HSDPA 3G, A-GPS and social networking apps, the Vivaz adds up to much more than a mere fashion phone.

Comment
The Royal Navy has decided to spend £127m to answer the question: "What should the next generation of frigates be like?" This is disappointing, as the real question is "do we actually need any more frigates?" and the answer is very likely "No, or not in their present form, anyway."

After an HTC Legend, the Android 2.1-based handset that's the manufacturer's follow up to the well-regarded Hero? You're going to have to get it from Vodafone, and if you want to one of the first to lay your mitts on it when it arrives on 2 April, you'll have to put your order in early.

Workshop
From the outside in, it’s easy to question the need for software patching. “Surely,” some might ask, “If software was written properly we wouldn’t need the IT department to spend time patching it?”

The Cassini spacecraft has sent back some unexpected surface temperature data from Saturnian moon Mimas - a satellite previous dubbed the "Death Star" for its prominent Herschel Crater, but now demonstrating its allegiance may lie more with Pac-Man than Star Wars:

US lawmakers are calling on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to probe privacy complaints about Google's Buzz, following a tirade of grumbles that greeted the creepy injection of the real-time Twitterbookish tech into Gmail in February this year.

It's official: as this is written, the most powerful particle collisions ever achieved by the human race are taking place inside the great subterranean detector caverns of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Mini Poll
In this week's ERP workshop poll, we get right into the specifics of what makes or breaks an implementation project in the real world. If you have experience or opinions on this, we'd appreciate your input.

Critics of the Australia’s proposed internet filtering scheme just keep on coming. This week, it's the turn of one of Australia’s biggest and most formidable allies, the United States, to put the boot into a scheme that would turn Australia into the free world’s strictest regulator of internet content.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), the publicly-funded private company that wields heavy influence over policing policy, will be included in the Freedom of Information Act from October next year.

The prognosticators and measurers at Gartner have focused their counting on semiconductor sales for 2009, and thanks to a rebound as the year came to a close and a truly awful ending in 2008 (making for easier compares), the worldwide semiconductor industry fell by only 10.5 per cent, to $228.4bn.

Updated Again
Update: This story has been updated to show that Google first said a change to its search url caused Tuesday's blockage in China but that it has now backtracked to say this was not the case.

When Steve Jobs met Google boss Eric Schmidt for coffee late last week, they may or may not have reached some common ground on certain hot-button subjects. But odds are, they didn't see eye-on-eye on Adobe Flash. As Jobs prepares to ship his much ballyhooed Apple iPad without even the possibility of running Flash - which he calls "buggy," littered with security holes, and a "CPU hog" - Google is actually integrating the beleaguered plug-in with its Chrome browser.

Intel's switch to the Nehalem architecture was finally completed Tuesday with the launch of the Nehalem-EX Xeon 6500 and 7500 processors, the last of the Core, Xeon, and Itanium chips to get the Quick Path Interconnect and a slew of features that make Intel chips compete head-to-head with alternatives from Advanced Micro Devices. The price war at the midrange and high-end of the x64 market can now get underway, while the all-out, total price war awaits the debut of AMD's Opteron 6100 processors in the second quarter.

Microsoft released an emergency IE patch on Tuesday after deciding that an upswing in hacking attacks targeting a zero-day vulnerability in IE 6 and 7 couldn't wait for the next scheduled edition of Patch Tuesday, due on 13 April.